When it comes to preparing for my interviews, it all depends on the type of interview. The easiest and my favorite is by sending out an email to my list saying, “Hey, I’m going to be interviewing Ben Settle on copywriting. If you’ve got any questions to ask Ben, send them in, and we’re going to cover everything you want to know about copywriting.” That’s the easiest.
The way I’ve done this past campaign is the easiest for preparing because your questions come from your students already.
Another simple way, a story interview, there is a gentleman named Stan Balut. He was a sales training expert, and the way we did his interview, I said, “Stan, okay, here’s how we’re going to do the interview. You’re going to think back in your career, and you’re going to come up with fifteen of your most incredible sales stories, and I want you to email them to me.”
So, he emailed me fifteen of all these stories, and then we did the interview, and all I said is, “Okay, Stan, you’ve given me fifteen of your greatest sales stories. Let’s start with number one.” Just like what I’m doing with you, Ben. You’ve got all the questions, and we’re taking them one at a time, and I would ask the question and he would just tell the story. That’s a real easy interview format.
People love stories. They love to listen to stories. They’re very powerful. Case stories, success stories, failure stories, stories sell for sure.
If you’re doing an interview and someone has a published book, you can look at their table of contents, or you can look in the back of their index, and you can pull all your questions from that. They’ve already had a publisher organize the whole format of the book so you can look at that table of contents and organize and create your entire interview that way. You can look at competitors’ books in the same market and look at how they did it.
There are simple things to prepare for the interview that don’t have to do with that. On the digital recorder, I make sure we had fresh batteries. I make sure I was on a hardwire phones. I make sure there are no interruptions or noises in the background. I make sure I have some water to drink. These are some things as well that you can practice in a little dry run the day before.
I figured it all out, and am prepared. So, I’ll be transparent. I’ve done a lot of preparation for my interviews or teleseminars. I don’t just wing it. I’ve got right in my hand a printout, twenty pages of my questions, and I have bullet points of everything I’m going to say.
That’s why I’m saying if you’re being interviewed, it’s hard. I’ve put days of work into just this teleseminar. You’ve got a lot of preparation. So, it’s easier to interview the expert. It’s easier to be the guy asking the questions.
So, those are the things that I would do to typically prepare for each one of my interviews.
